Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.

Friday, July 19, 2013

The killing and trial of Trayvon Martin: Black humanity on trial in America, again

“Let us banish from our minds the
thought that this is an unfortunate victim of injustice. The very concept of
injustice rests upon the premise of equal claims.” – Richard Wright

The above quote from the author
Richard Wright is a reminder that the consequences of enslavement are still
very much a part of the cultural, social and political makeup of the United
States of America. From time to time in the history of society there are
incidents or series of incidents that brings together the central
contradictions of the society. The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the case of
the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, was one such incident that
brought out the history of racism, racial profiling, white vigilantism and the
realities that black people and their allies have to organize to change the
system. There is hardly a decent person inside the United States who was not
moved by this verdict that was handed down on July 13, 2013. Throughout the
trial, and following the verdict, it became clear that the US system put on
trial the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, who was murdered by an armed
stalker.

The trial dehumanized Trayvon
Martin, put his friend Rachel Jeantel up for ridicule and turned the killer
George Zimmerman into a victim. George Zimmerman was portrayed as someone
merely defending himself, and was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter.
Juror B37 stated that she and others on the jury believed that Zimmerman had a
right to stand his ground. In the common law, self-defense argument generally
states that if you are threatened with imminent bodily harm or death, you have
a right to defend yourself. Significantly, it had the requirement that if one
has the opportunity to retreat from that threat, you must do so. Stand Your
Ground law removes that requirement. In other words, don’t retreat; take the
other person’s life. What kind of legal system justifies laws such as the Stand
Your Ground law that was used as part of the deliberative guidelines by the
jury that acquitted Zimmerman? The application of this law in the jury
deliberation buys into the Zimmerman story in which he stated that he resorted
to shooting unarmed Trayvon Martin by way of self-defense against his perceived
fear of harm from the fight he had started with a teenager that was minding his
own business.

There have been numerous
commentaries on this case which now stands out as the most recent example of
the fact that blacks have no claim to equality before the law in the United
States. Throughout the world, people are asking: “what kind of society has a
system where a George Zimmerman can walk free?”

In seeking to answer this question,
one would discover that this social system of racial terror was never meant to
serve the needs of persons such as Trayvon Martin. Florida is a state of the
Old Confederacy that fought against the freedom of blacks. It was and remains
one of the states where the ideas of white supremacy are stamped in almost
every aspect of life and the citizens of that state carry the memories of the
dehumanization and lynching of blacks in that society. In many ways, the
killing of Trayvon and the verdict of not guilty was a reminder to many who may
have been living in a dream that the United States is a post-racial society.

As a resident of this society, we
immediately cast our minds back to the previous experiences of the killings of
black persons such as Emmet Till, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant and the thousands
of black lives that are uselessly snuffed out needlessly.

In this analysis we seek to draw on
the current conjuncture and how the experience of Trayvon Martin was acting as
a wakeup call to galvanize a new movement for human dignity.

Memory of Racism and Dehumanizing
Justice System in US and Florida

The Zimmerman case invokes the
memory of rabid racist history in the US, and Florida in particular. This
history is characterized by the killing of blacks by whites with impunity,
white vigilantism (in which any white man has the right to stop, interrogate,
and violate the humanity of any black person), and a legal system that was
built to protect whites and their property against black people.

When Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin,
it took mass mobilizations and protests to get the local authorities to arrest
and prosecute this killer who had walked free for over one month after
committing this crime. This kind of indifference by authorities to the wasting
of black life is not new in Florida. In 1923, Rosewood, a black town in
Florida, was terrorized, burned down and abandoned after white massacre of
blacks. And yet no one was arrested or held accountable. A white woman in
adjoining city of Sumner had accused a black man of assaulting her, following
which white vigilantes lynched a black man from Rosewood. The defensive actions
taken by Rosewood residents against further attacks led to a mass manhunt and
massacre of blacks resulting in the abandonment of this black town. No arrest
was made.

While the justice system ensured
that there were no arrests and proper prosecution of crimes such as that
committed in Rosewood against blacks, these same black people were almost
immediately assumed guilty and terrorized by the slightest accusations from
whites. In Groveland, Florida, the accusation by a white woman Norma Padgett,
who claimed that she and her husband had been attacked by four black men in
1949, resulted in extrajudicial killings in the hands of Florida authorities –
now notoriously known as the Groveland Shooting.

The same city of Sanford where
Zimmerman killed Trayvon was one of the two Florida cities (the other being
Jacksonville) that doubled down on racist segregation laws to mobilize against
African American baseball icon Jackie Robinson in the 1940s. The action of the
people of these cities ensured that Robinson’s team, the Dodgers, moved their
spring training away to another location, the City Island Ball Park in 1947.
Today, many young persons who haven’t read about this legacy of Sanford,
Florida, can get an idea of its racist legacy from the movie, “42,” about the
experience of Jackie Robinson in racist America.

The accosting of Trayvon Martin by
George Zimmerman reminded all citizens of the United States of the Fugitive
Slave Laws that gave whites the right to stop free blacks to verify their
status. From 1793, the US Congress had passed Fugitive Slave Acts which were
codified on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850. It declared
that all runaway slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters.
Any white person could stop a black person. This was the white vigilante
tradition that George Zimmerman was following.

The Humanity of Blacks and Rights in
America

The argument that has been paraded by
supporters of Zimmerman, including his defense team and one of the jurors (B37)
is that he had killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. They even claim that
Trayvon Martin caused or contributed largely to his own death. It is not
surprising to me that this argument disregards the right of unarmed Trayvon
Martin to defend himself against an armed stranger that followed and accosted
him in the dark. The larger question here is whether blacks are indeed
considered equal to white under the law. This question of equality before the
law has been at the core of the struggle for human dignity by blacks in
America.

Many observers around the world
should now grapple with the historical reality that in many parts of the United
States, blacks are not really considered full citizens. From the time of
enslavement, black people were considered sub human. This view of black people
as sub species had been enshrined in the US constitution when blacks were
designated as 3/5 of a person. It required a major war, the American Civil War
(1861-1865), for black people in the United States to be considered as
citizens. Before this major war, there had been legal and political struggles
such as the Dredd Scott case where the Supreme Court of the United States
declared that “no black, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship.”

Last month the Supreme Court of the
United States rolled back the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In every sphere of
life, black and oppressed people are finding out that they have to develop new
forms of struggles to change the social system. After a Civil War, the civil
rights movement and the election of a President of African descent, the
progressives are finding out that the removal of racism will require system
change. Since a black man became the president of the United States,
conservative forces have been hard at work in many states of their stronghold,
devising ways to chip away the voting rights from blacks and other oppressed
such as Latinos.

After the major struggles against
slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights rebellions, there had been complacency
among sections of the two dominant political parties in the United States that
the country was in a post-racial moment. In fact, the media specifically did
not use the term racism but instead use the concept “race” to disguise and
cover up the intensified racism and brutality against African Americans. This
cover up did not hide the realities that in every sphere of life blacks were
oppressed. The school-to-prison pipeline placed the black and brown population
in a for-profit prison system where 70 per cent of those behind bars are black
and brown. The killings of black people by racists and police have not abated.
Whether it was the killing of Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant or Trayvon Martin,
black people are routinely and arbitrarily killed in the United States.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman
has opened the eyes of millions of people to the conditions of the black and
brown citizens. In an effort to create divisions between oppressed blacks and
oppressed Latinos, the media has been touting the fact that George Zimmerman is
Latino. But this has not disguised his profiling and racist intent in the
murder of Trayvon. All classes of blacks have now jumped in to demand that the
Justice Department bring a civil suit against George Zimmerman.

Eric Holder, the first African
American Attorney General of the United States, in his address to the annual
convention of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People) on July 16 spoke about his own experiences of racial profiling
reminding the audience that these practices were still at large. He said in
part,

“Years ago, some of these same
issues drove my father to sit down with me to have a conversation – which is no
doubt familiar to many of you – about how as a young black man I should
interact with the police, what to say, and how to conduct myself if I was ever
stopped or confronted in a way I thought was unwarranted. I’m sure my father
felt certain – at the time – that my parents’ generation would be the last that
had to worry about such things for their children.”

Eric Holder is now being pushed by
the anger of a new energized and mobilized social justice community. The day
before he spoke to the NAACP, Holder had made forceful statements about the
case in his address to the influential African-American sorority Delta Sigma
Theta. Holder was addressing the sorority’s national convention in its
centennial celebration. This organization was founded one hundred years ago in
the midst of segregation and lynching as a movement for civil rights. Founded
by educated black women at Howard University, Delta Sigma Theta is the largest
single organization of African-American women in the United States. Since the
sixties, these women have moved into the middle and upper echelons of society
and the members of Delta Sigma Theta represent a who’s who of African-American
politicians, educators and activists. Many of these women consider themselves
successful, but the acquittal of George Zimmerman reminded them that this
system will never provide equality for black people. It is this reality that
forces women of sororities such as Delta Sigma Theta to continue to be involved
in the struggles for civil rights. Except that in this period of capitalist
crisis, the struggles for civil rights are no longer simply about voting and
equal access to housing, education and employment. Sixty years ago, the United
States could have promoted the fiction that the legal struggles were separate
from the struggles for a new social system, but the economic crisis since 2007
has clarified the bare realities of the class and racial polarizations so that
even the “democratic” façade of the United States now stands exposed.

Dividing the Oppressed

During the trial of George
Zimmerman, it was Trayvon Martin who turned out to be on trial and Zimmerman
was portrayed as a victim. Trayvon’s mode of dress, wearing a hoodie, was
presented as a form of “deviance.” During the trial, the lawyer for Zimmerman
made a lot of to do about Trayvon. His school record was brought up. While all
sorts of drug tests were conducted on an unarmed dead victim of profiling, the
vigilante who killed Trayvon was not tested for drugs or alcohol. It was revealed
during the court proceedings that Trayvon had marijuana in his system and was
thus characterized as a thug. In a strange twist of historical irony, one day
after the verdict, the “Glee” TV star, Cory Monteith, died of an overdose of
heroin and alcohol, but the media did not portray him as a drug addict but
sympathized about “how his story was tragic.”

At the same time the media has been
hard at work portraying Zimmerman as a Latino while conservatives have weighed
in to argue that the passions evoked by this case has overshadowed the rampant
crime inside the oppressed communities. The conservatives have labeled this
oppression black-on-black crime. The term “black-on-black” crime has become
popular in the playbook of those who want to deflect attention from the
historical context of terror and dehumanization that undergird race crimes and
brutality meted out on black and brown people by whites and law enforcement in
America. They are quick to draw attention to crimes in some black communities.
In my own home town, one of my colleagues in the Political Science Department
of Syracuse University, Professor Laurence Thomas wrote an op-ed for the local
newspaper on this theme of black-on-black crime.

Well, it is true that crime anywhere
in the society is not desirable, and that more needs to be done to address
them. But the term black-on-black crime is a misnomer that is not intended to
tackle the root causes of these crimes, but concocted as an excuse to downplay
the gravity of racist crimes. The same people who use this term would not use
“white-on-white crime” to describe the killing sprees in schools, theatres, and
malls in America, of which the perpetrators and majority of the victims are
Caucasians. Instead, efforts such as gun control and the availability of
resources meant to address these crimes – whether those prevalent in white or
black communities – are frustrated by the merchants of the military industrial
complex and the prison industrial complex who benefit from the deformed system.

Black Oppression and the Capitalist
Crisis

The capitalist crisis has been felt
disproportionately by the black and brown peoples in the United States. The
Wall Street moguls have used this crisis to transfer wealth from the poor to
the rich and to disenfranchise the poor. The city of Detroit, a predominantly
black city is the most recent high profile case of a city where black citizens
are being disenfranchised; where a republican governor has placed the city
under an emergency manager. In reality, the task of the emergency manager is to
shift responsibility for capitalism’s crisis away from bankers, CEOs and
hedge-fund managers and onto the backs of the most vulnerable. In the case of
Detroit, that means poor and working-class African Americans who make up the
vast majority of the city’s population.

Oppression was always severe for the
African descendants in the US but since 2008, there has been an intensification
of black subjugation and mass incarceration. With unemployment in the
black community way over 25 per cent, there have been increased racial attacks
with a spiraling of violence and police brutality, emboldened dope dealers
(destruction of public schools, governmental attacks on voting rights laws,
etc.).

In New York City the establishment
promote a stop-and-frisk policy by which a police officer who reasonably
suspects a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony
or a penal law misdemeanor, stops and questions that person, and, if the
officer reasonably suspects he or she is in danger of physical injury, frisks
the person stopped for weapons. Of the more than 700,000 persons stopped
every year, more than 90 per cent are blacks and browns.

System Change Necessary for Justice

When the verdict came out on
Saturday evening, July 13, the establishment worked hard to pacify the rage
among decent people by pointing out that the courts had spoken. As soon as the
verdict was made known there were spontaneous demonstrations all over the
country. Young and old, black, white and brown, men and women, gays and
straights spoke out against this blatant dehumanization of Trayvon Martin.
African American churches immediately became spaces for “prayer” vigils and
other historical forms of meetings for mobilization. Significantly, despite the
efforts to divide blacks from Latinos, in Washington Heights, a predominantly
Dominican neighborhood of New York City, there was an organized protest. From
San Francisco to Washington and from Los Angeles to Atlanta, the people came
out to demonstrate while the conservatives used the media to pour invective on
blacks. In every media, whether print, TV, social media or blogs there is an
unprecedented outpouring of opinions.

Robin D. G. Kelley in an excellent
article, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin,” summed up the views of many progressives
when he wrote,

“The point is that justice was
always going to elude Trayvon Martin, not because the system failed, but
because it worked. Martin died and Zimmerman walked because our entire
political and legal foundations were built on an ideology of settler
colonialism—an ideology in which the protection of white property rights was
always sacrosanct; predators and threats to those privileges were almost always
black, brown, and red; and where the very purpose of police power was to
discipline, monitor, and contain populations rendered a threat to white
property and privilege. This has been the legal standard for African
Americans and other racial groups in the U.S. long before ALEC or the NRA came
into being.”

The killing of Trayvon Martin, the
acquittal of the killer Zimmermann, and the vigorous defense of the verdict by
sections of the US society who claim that “the jury has spoken” and that “the
due process of the law/justice” was applied, underscore the fact that this case
was not about Florida or Zimmerman. It was about the US justice system and the
societal ideation system of liberalism built on the duality and contradictions
of “human vs. sub-human,” “white supremacy vs. black/brown inferiority,” “full
rights of citizenship vs. selective rights.”

Globally, people are asking what’s
next. Some are pointing to legal avenues, calling on the Attorney General of
the United States to take action. As of Wednesday July 17, one million people
have signed an NAACP petition asking the Department of Justice to pursue
federal and civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. The strategy of the
NAACP is to pressure the Attorney General to investigate whether Zimmerman’s
actions constitute a hate crime under federal law. The Justice Department had
closely monitored the case since March, and only put their investigation on
hold to respect the state’s trial. Since the verdict and the overwhelming
response, Attorney General Eric Holder has agreed to re-open his investigation.
However, it would be a major error to focus on legal actions only.

A system change is what will be
required to undo this contradiction of the dehumanization of black people
inside this social system. Progressive forces and decent human beings must make
this the focus of the next phase of the historical struggle to be human in
America.